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Study Suggests Sex Can Ruin Your Relationship

October 23, 2013

Whether you’re mar­ried or just dat­ing your older man, sex is inevitably going to have to be fac­tored into the rela­tion­ship, at least at some point or another. We read lots of infor­ma­tion on how you can improve your sex life with your older man, whether it’s by express­ing your needs, dress­ing up, or find­ing other ways to get cre­ative. It also doesn’t come as much of a sur­prise that cou­ples who have reg­u­lar sex are happier.

But researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto have taken it one step fur­ther. They’ve dis­cov­ered that the qual­ity of your sex life, not to men­tion the qual­ity of your rela­tion­ship, actu­ally has a lot to do with why you’re hav­ing sex in the first place.

The study looked at people’s moti­va­tions for hav­ing sex with their spouse and divided the com­mon rea­sons into two cat­e­gories: approach and avoid­ance. Approach motives are directed toward achiev­ing a par­tic­u­lar out­come, like increas­ing inti­macy, while avoid­ance moti­va­tions are to avoid a neg­a­tive out­come, like doing it to avoid a conflict.

The par­tic­i­pants were asked to com­plete a sur­vey daily for two weeks, and when they had sex, there were asked to report on their motives and rate their level of sat­is­fac­tion. The results showed that when you act on a pos­i­tive moti­va­tion (approach motives), you’ll be more sex­u­ally sat­is­fied. But the same goes for your part­ner. If you’re hav­ing sex for pos­i­tive rea­sons, your part­ner is more likely to feel more sat­is­fac­tion and desire. On the other hand, if you’re act­ing on a neg­a­tive moti­va­tion (avoid­ance motives), not only will you not be sat­is­fied, but nei­ther will your partner.

The results car­ried over into long-term sat­is­fac­tion, too. Cou­ples who reported hav­ing sex for more pos­i­tive rea­sons were more sex­u­ally sat­is­fied four months down the road, com­pared to cou­ples who only had sex for neg­a­tive rea­sons and weren’t as sat­is­fied in their relationship.

Although the study focused pri­mar­ily on mar­i­tal sex, the results can still be applied to your May-December rela­tion­ship. The find­ings just go to show that, in any rela­tion­ship, just hav­ing sex isn’t enough. There has to be a real con­nec­tion beyond sex in order for any rela­tion­ship to really work. Even if you’re casu­ally dat­ing a sugar daddy and sex is just part of your agreed-upon arrange­ment, it still has to be sat­is­fy­ing for him. And if you’re just doing it so that you can avoid piss­ing him off, it won’t be any bet­ter for him than it is for you. When sex is more of a chore than a desire, no one ben­e­fits. If you con­tinue down that path, he’ll just find another sugar baby with whom he has a bet­ter sex­ual con­nec­tion with.

What do you think: Have you had sex with an older man before just for the sake of avoid­ing something?